George Yardley's daughter Anne Yardley poses with some of the memorabilia at the late NBA player's Newport Beach home.

ROD VEAL, ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER

To celebrate its 100th anniversary, the CIF Southern Section this year established a list of the top 100 athletes of all time, a prestigious collection that includes three former Newport Harbor High athletic stars – Misty May-Treanor, Aaron Peirsol and George Yardley.

While May-Treanor (women's beach volleyball) and Peirsol (men's swimming) are multiple Olympic gold medalists in their sport, the late Yardley comes from a different era and stands alone as perhaps the greatest athlete ever in Orange County. Yardley might qualify for such lofty recognition based solely on his basketball career – he's a member of the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame – but the subjective statement of "greatest athlete ever" is easier if you consider the variety and level of sports in which he competed throughout his life.

In addition to basketball, Yardley was a collegiate and Amateur Athletic Union All-American in volleyball, as well as a five-time national age-group champion in tennis. He also achieved low-handicap status on the golf course.

"Research shows that George Yardley is the greatest and most respected Orange County athlete in history," said longtime Newport Harbor High supporter Brian Theriot, also a former Newport football tailback and track and field star.

The gymnasium floor at Newport Harbor is named after Yardley. The annual Orange County Athlete of the Year Award used to be called the George Yardley Award. His grandson, Kyle Caldwell, won the honor in 2012 as a basketball and volleyball standout at Newport Harbor. Even though it has been almost nine years since George Yardley died of ALS, he continues to reap Hall of Fame credentials.

Earlier this month, his daughter, Anne, who lives in the Back Bay-front Dover Shores home her father built in 1967, picked up another award when he was named posthumously to the Adoption Guild Hall of Fame for his years of volunteer service. The 52nd Annual Roy Emerson Adoption Guild Tennis Classic, hosted by Newport Beach Tennis Club, began Memorial Day weekend and continues through June 2. As an amateur tennis player, George Yardley won several age-group championships in the Adoption Guild event.

"I've never heard anyone say anything negative about him, even when he'd been nasty," Anne Yardley Caldwell said during a tour of the newspaper and magazine articles that line a hallway in the house.

In trying to list all of her father's "Hall of Fame" honors, Anne started with the Basketball Hall of Fame, then continued with the Orange County Sports Hall of Fame, Stanford Hall of Fame, Bay Area Hall of Fame, Michigan Hall of Fame, Newport Harbor High Hall of Fame, Southern California Tennis Association Hall of Fame, Pac-10 Hall of Fame, and the Helms Athletic Foundation Hall of Fame, in addition to several other awards, including the Indiana Red Coat Award, which goes to the Man of the Year.

"We all remember that one," Anne said of the trip to Fort Wayne, Ind., to receive the Red Coat Award, replacing a Hawaiian family vacation.

Yardley, a six-time NBA All-Star, is perhaps most famous for being the first player in NBA history to score 2,000 points in a single season, when he accomplished the feat for the Detroit Pistons in the 1957-58 season, the first year the Pistons played in Detroit. But Yardley had his engineering degree from Stanford and retired early from basketball to make more money. In the early 1960s, that's how life was for professional athletes.

During the five off-season months of the NBA in the '50s, Yardley was helping the United States in the Cold War and Space War against the Soviet Union. His classified work included the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles Atlas and Titan, and the interior valves and regulators, and helium pressure-control devices, for the X-15, a rocket-powered research aircraft designed to explore the fringes of outer space. Once, during an NBA off-season, Yardley invented a liquid-oxygen seal that helped make the Titan operative.

A great success in the engineering business, Yardley was perhaps the NBA's most unhappy star, because it was holding him back from making bigger paychecks to support his family, and the time away from his family was horrendous. After seven years in the NBA, and another with the Los Angeles Jets in the old National Basketball League (NBL) under then-coach Bill Sharman, Yardley hung up his sneakers. "I was the highest paid player in the (NBL), but the bad news is that the checks never cleared," Yardley once quipped.

In his prime engineering years, while raising four children with his late wife, Diana, Yardley built an empire, yet never retired from his work. "What would I ever do if I retired?" he once said.

Warm and friendly with a never-ending sense of humor, Yardley was flamboyant in numerous ways, including never being afraid to wear an orange or pink jacket. He made jokes and laughed a lot. He was always fun to be around. He could paint, play the piano and build a house from the ground up.

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